When a president is impeached: Learning from the Andrew Johnson trial

By Brenda Wineapple

New York Daily News|

Jun 17, 2019 | 5:00 AM

Saved by one vote. (Library of Congress/Getty Images)

“The multitude of strangers were waiting for impeachment,” Mark Twain wryly noted a century and a half ago, back in 1868. He might as well have been talking about today. “They did not know what impeachment was, exactly,” the humorist continued, “but they had a general idea that it would come in the form of an avalanche, or a thunder clap, or that maybe the roof would fall in.”

What is impeachment, and is it as calamitous as an avalanche or caved roof? Perhaps the example of the Tennessee Democrat Andrew Johnson would be instructive. Many congressmen on both sides of the aisle loathed Johnson, who, as Abraham Lincoln’s vice-president, entered the White House after Lincoln’s assassination.

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Johnson tried to welcome back into the Union the 11 formerly seceded states, even though it was up to Congress to determine the qualifications of its members. He pardoned as many as 100 ex-rebels a day, restoring their rights, their property (except slaves) and returning them to government office. He vetoed all civil rights legislation, and he urged the South not to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted citizenship and due process to the 4 million formerly enslaved blacks.

“This is a country for white men,” he reportedly said. “As long as I am president it shall be a government for white men.” He dismissed descriptions of violence perpetrated on black men and women and loyal Republicans as fake news, and he ranted in stump speeches that his perceived enemies should be hanged.

But though it was clear that Johnson was abusing power and obstructing justice, when Ohio Rep. James Ashley called for Johnson’s impeachment in early 1867, Ashley’s action was dismissed as hasty. Still, the House Judiciary Committee began a protracted investigation of Johnson’s transgressions — or, more to the point, it looked for a smoking gun to deliver demonstrably legal grounds for Johnson’s impeachment.

For while the Constitution outlines the rightful and even necessary way to remove an unfit president, it also made conviction hard to pull off. It takes just a simple majority in the House of Representatives to impeach, but two-thirds of the Senate are needed to convict.

Most Republicans had been disinclined to impeach, preferring instead to wait until the next election. Then Johnson ostentatiously broke the law — albeit a law of dubious constitutionality passed specifically to prevent him from firing Edwin Stanton, his secretary of war, who controlled the military, which protected black and Republican voters in the South.

That was it. In early 1868, the House voted overwhelming to impeach Johnson, 126 to 47.

Then it was onto the Senate. Republicans held a majority far greater than the needed two-thirds for removal, but Johnson avoided conviction by only one vote. For impeachment, as every pundit reminds us, is as much a political process as a legal one.

That is, although the House in 1868 needed an actual infraction of the law to take them over the line to impeach the demagogic, racist president who usurped power, Johnson’s deft lawyers finally argued in broader political terms: respect and preserve the office of the presidency even if you disapprove of its present inhabitant for his crudeness, his bias, his obstructionism and his disdain for a legally reconstructed nation. In other words, don’t rock the boat.

Though Johnson remained in the White House, he would not be nominated in 1868 by either party; Johnson had no real base. And for another difference between then and now, remember that the popular general Ulysses S. Grant was poised to run for president.

But those who impeached and then voted for Johnson’s conviction knew that, even though they’d lost, they’d been heard: The president is not a king, and any position, however high, cannot be permitted to shelter crime or imperil the republic. A principle, an important one, was at stake, and to those who condemned Andrew Johnson, principle forever remained inseparable from politics.

Wineapple is author of the recently published “The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation.”